Joe "Kingpin" Grand has been involved in the hacker community from its early days. He was just 7 when he started messing around with computers; by 1998 at age 22—as part of the legendary Boston-based hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries—Grand was testifying before a US Senate committee on the state of government computer security.

Though the group claimed at that hearing that they could take down the internet in less than 30 minutes, Grand has used his powers wisely. He's appeared on the Discovery Channel's Prototype This!, and now teaches others about hardware hacking and embedded security through his company, Grand Idea Studio.

PCMag met up with him at NASA Research Park during the DARPA SDR Hackfest and asked him a few questions just before he gave his keynote speech. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Let's start with the word "hacker." How have you seen it change?[JG] Hacker has a long and storied history. To me, the term is one of endearment for someone who could solve technical problems in unique ways. In the mid-80s, the media started using the word more often to associate with criminal or malicious activity. When I joined The L0pht in 1992, we worked hard to teach the public how good hackers could provide value to society. To this day, it remains a controversial word, but I continue to proudly call myself a hacker.

At L0pht, you called yourselves "gray hats," right? We wanted to distinguish ourselves from the whole white hat versus black hat debate; the right versus wrong. Not that we were doing anything illegal, but we were often doing things that had never been done publicly before, like finding vulnerabilities in software and hardware products, and the laws were much more vague.

And then, after L0pht, while doing security consulting, teaching hardware hacking classes and making stuff, you also became a non-scripted television personality on Prototype This! How did that come about? I'm an engineer by trade and a hacker by lifestyle—by philosophy, if you like. But, my background is in engineering. Yeah, I discovered bulletin boards early on, worked out how to make free phone calls, all the subversive stuff. But computers were a tool, a fascinating tool, but a tool nevertheless. For me I really like that tangible piece that comes with designing electronics—taking an idea in my head and turning it into something real.

I'd gotten involved with Make magazine when it launched [in 2005] and served as an early advisor. Then, as the DIY community started to grow and become more popular, Discovery Channel wanted to make a series that followed a team building crazy projects. They already had the others: Zoz [Andrew Brooks] as the robotics guy, Mike North from UC Santa Barbara as our materials science guy, and Terry Sandin, an amazing special effects creator and machinist from Hollywood. The producers asked "Who else do we need?" and Zoz said, "We need an electronics guy."

Find us a man with an oscillator. [Laughs] Exactly. The production company contacted me via the folks at Make. I did a little dog-and-pony show with a bunch of my electronic projects at the original TechShop in Menlo Park.

(For those curious about the story behind TechShop, which sadly just announced its bankruptcy, the founders posted it here.)

Prototype This! looked like a fun series. You covered a lot of ground in 13 episodes, from making a Gecko Superhero Suit to the six-legged, all-terrain vehicle. The main goal of the show was to follow the real-life engineering and build process—inventing, prototyping, testing, revising, and so on. It was very challenging, but really a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about aspects of prototyping, engineering, production that I wouldn't have learned anywhere else.

Let's back up and talk about your testimony to the US Senate in 1998. You were only 22, and known purely by your hacker handle "Kingpin," then suddenly thrust into the public eye. That was my first public speaking experience. I was too nervous to really say anything useful, but I thought we did a great job as a group to bring the positive role of hackers into the public consciousness and, on the flip side, let the world know what could be done by malicious actors. We weren't trying to scare people, but we were asked to share a doomsday scenario, one of which was we said we could take down the internet in 30 minutes. We also talked about a whole bunch of other stuff that didn't get the same amount of attention.

But that one became the headline and foretold much of what's happening since. Since then, you've become instrumental in bridging the gap between the hacker community and government, which brings us to your speech here today at DARPA. It wasn't until years later I realized what a turning point that day was. I've worked with DARPA before for their Cyber Fast Track research program a few years back, started by Mudge [aka Peiter Zatko], one of our guys in The L0pht. It's good to be here today for the Hackfest.

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Your speech won't be taped, so can you give us a few highlights? It's going to be a fun talk about lessons learned on Prototype This! and how they can be applied to starting companies. It turns out there are a lot of similarities! I'm also going to show some details of a few projects, the ones that will hopefully appeal to the DARPA Hackfest crowd—an autonomous pizza delivery robot, lifejacket-delivering drone, and a truck that can elevate itself and drive over traffic.

Sounds cool. Then, after this, you're heading to London to do your hardware hacking training at Black Hat Europe? At The L0pht, I learned the importance of sharing information and empowering others. I try to do that with every project I'm involved in. With my hardware hacking classes, I get to teach folks about reverse engineering and exploiting electronic systems from a perspective of both product designer and hacker. It's a lot of fun and personally very satisfying. You know, the whole 'teach a man to fish' thing. I think it's important that hackers continue to be involved in education, creating new technologies, and sharing knowledge.

If you're in London on Dec 4-5, Joe Grand will be doing hardware hacking training at Black Hat Europe 2017.

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